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Wednesday, 21 November 2018

The Touring Book Club: The Boy and the Bear #TouringPictureBook

We are back with another Touring Picture Book post and this month The Touring Book Club team comprising of ourselves and three other book loving families (Bookbairn, Acorn Books and Mamma Fliz) have chosen the very beautiful The Boy and the Bear to share with you all. Written by Tracey Corderoy and illustrated by Sarah Massini, The Boy and the Bear is a heart-warming story of an unlikely friendship and is perfect for snuggling up with on a cold Winter's day.

The Boy and the Bear

The Boy and the Bear, which was first published last year, is now available in paperback and we are delighted to have received a copy from publisher, Nosy Crow, for the purpose of this post.

The story begins with a lonely little boy who just wants a friend to play with but all he can find is a shy bear. When the boy starts to receive mysterious little paper boats asking him to play, he excitedly wonders who his new best friend may be. On discovering it is the shy bear, he is at first a little disappointed, especially as the bear doesn't understand how to play his games! However the unlikely duo soon start to have fun together as they build themselves a treehouse and gaze at the moon. Unfortunately with the arrival of Winter, the bear has to go away and the boy is lonely once more. But do not panic, the story ends happily as the friends are reunited in the Spring with the return of the warmer weather!

This beautifully illustrated story shows that friendship can exist in the most unusual places and can overcome all sorts of boundaries, even hibernation! We love how it explores the changing seasons and the playful yet tender depiction of such an unusual friendship.

Origami Friendship Bears

Inspired by the Boy and the Bear's origami boats in the story, we had a go at some origami of our own and, by following the instructions in a book we already had, we created some little blue friendship bears! Mini Reviewers, Izzie and Theo, wrote messages on the back of their bears to send to their best buddies and we quickly realised that the little bears make perfect bookmarks too!

However, even with comprehensive instructions, the bears were quite tricky, so instead you could always make simple paper boats to write messages on just like the boy and the bear do in the story and have fun floating them to each other! We found some simple instructions for paper boats online here.

We hope you enjoyed our post and don't forget to take a peek at what the other members of The Touring Book Club got up to this month:

This our family blog written by me, Kate, with the help of my three Mini Reviewers. We started the blog in 2016 to keep track of our 366 books in 366 days reading challenge. Having now completed the challenge we continue to share book recommendations, as well as play ideas, parenting tips and product reviews. We hope you enjoy reading all about what we get up to!